Welcome to where I am, where my kitchen's always messy, a pot's (or a poet) always about to boil over, a dog is always begging to be fed. Drafts of poems on the counter. Windows filled with leaves. Wind. Clouds moving over the mountains. If you like poetry, books, and music--especially dog howls when a siren unwinds down the hill-- you'll like it here.


MY NEW AUTHOR'S SITE, KATHRYNSTRIPLINGBYER.COM, THAT I MYSELF SET UP THROUGH WEEBLY.COM, IS NOW UP. I HAD FUN CREATING THIS SITE AND WOULD RECOMMEND WEEBLY.COM TO ANYONE INTERESTED IN SETTING UP A WEBSITE. I INVITE YOU TO VISIT MY NEW SITE TO KEEP UP WITH EVENTS RELATED TO MY NEW BOOK.


MY NC POET LAUREATE BLOG, MY LAUREATE'S LASSO, WILL REMAIN UP AS AN ARCHIVE OF NC POETS, GRADES K-INFINITY! I INVITE YOU TO VISIT WHEN YOU FEEL THE NEED TO READ SOME GOOD POEMS.

VISIT MY NEW BLOG, MOUNTAIN WOMAN, WHERE YOU WILL FIND UPDATES ON WHAT'S HAPPENING IN MY KITCHEN, IN THE ENVIRONMENT, IN MY IMAGINATION, IN MY GARDEN, AND AMONG MY MOUNTAIN WOMEN FRIENDS.




Monday, January 16, 2012

CONTINUING TO EXCAVATE OUR SOUTHERN PAST




On Martin Luther King day, I remember a poem I began on a drive several years ago from Selma to Montgomery.  It first appeared in Crab Orchard Review's special issue on Southern writing.

How do we keep the memory of those times alive?   Maybe by re-examining and excavating our own memories and sharing them?  Even though they may be powder-kegs, frighteningly explosive if we come too close to them.

This poem will be in my new collection, Descent, due from LSU Press in early fall of 2012.  



What I See Now


I see yucca and winter stubble along
their route, now and then markers 
noting the sites where they camped,
singing hymns, keeping watch as the Ancient
Ones do in the Bibles they carried.

I take note of hay bales like those 
I grew up seeing everywhere,
Billy’s Tire Center crumbling to nothing
beside a small graveyard with plastic blooms
bled now to white from the weather.

Montgomery waits straight ahead,
looking these days  like everywhere else.
Wal-Mart.  Home Depot. 
Driving through downtown,
we tick off the fast-food chains.
Why not MacDonald’s?  We order

our coffee to go.  Senior
discount.  The girl at the register
rings it up, looking no older than
seventeen, her story holding
not much left of what happened

here
forty years ago.
Blue eyes,
I notice.  Stark
purple eye shadow. 


*


My best friend at Finishing School,
as we  called it while lifting
our lily-white pinkies
and pursing our lips for effect,
came from Selma, 
a beauty queen born late
to parents who asked that their only child
not room with anyone whose shade
of iris bloomed darker than blue.   

Smoking cigarettes, bold in the parking lot,
we watched a regiment of frat men
in Rebel duds raising  the Bonnie Blue Flag
while their girlfriends stood swaying
in hoop skirts: a squadron of cheerleaders
urging them onward, their brave drunks, 
defenders of white Southern womanhood.

Meanwhile her mother was driving
across the state line with a black woman
kept in the back seat to mind
many layers of pink lace and satin,
arriving in time for the ball-gown
to be lifted out  and ironed ever so carefully 
down in the basement where 

those not invited to Mayday
Ball, rapt as an ashram
of wannabe’s, inhaled
our Salem's right down
to the filter and exhaled
our smoke rings,
observing them hang 
in the singed air like ghosts 
before fading away. 




*




Spanish moss hung, 
my friend later told me,
from phony live oaks round the dance floor
while black waiters served phony champagne
(no alcohol  within a 50 mile radius lest
we  be banished, forevermore losing
our chance to be “finished”
like fine crystal ready to be rung

by just the right finger.).
My friend’s gown came back
splashed with whiskey, a stain 
that could never be washed from its pink
satin bodice. My friend did not come back
the next year.  She transferred to Birmingham
Southern.  I wonder what she saw

with those bonnie eyes when the 16th Street
Baptist Church blew, and the little girls pulled
from the rubble lay finished
beyond comprehension, 
their role in this story I see now
as being a stubble field 
close to the edge

of an altered state
line I’m still
trying to cross
with an old
roadmap wrinkled
as yesterday’s
pink satin
inside my skull.



                                       

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